Precisely who wrote the Bible has been debated for centuries â€“ but now scientists have devised a computer program that sheds much more light on the sources of the various religious texts within it.

Israeli computer scientists and Bible scholars have written an algorithm that analyses the writing styles found within various sections.

While it canâ€™t pinpoint an individual author, the program has been able to determine when a passage has been written by more than one person and can detect the point at which a new author has taken over.

The Bible comes in two sections â€“ the Old Testament and the New Testament....

Again, the magnificent, but silly faith in computers/techonology is demonstrated.

This type of program is nothing new, but the reporters of this particular project are clearly ignorant of the limits of authorship attribution algorithms. Case in point, most (i would argue all) algorithms will return that the works of C.S. Lewis were written by two people, one that wrote the non-fiction (such as Mere Christianity), and the other fiction (such as the Chronicles of Narnia, the Screwtape Letters, etc). If such an algorithm returned one author for the entire corpus, then there would be room for discussion.